Make Them Laugh In 140 Characters

If you’re on twitter, chances are that you’ve got your timeline neatly categorized into various heads and sub heads – political, news portals, the self obsessed lot, the explicit ones, the Chinese and Greek proverb copier, celebrities and, of course, the funny ones, among others.

Now the trick to getting the best timeline is to have a healthy mix of all of the above – the not so desirable categories like Chinese and Greek proverb copiers, the self obsessed lot and the celebrities just so you can have something to make snide asides about. The news portals to keep afloat the pretense of being constantly updated and the political ones so you can sound intelligent at the next beer tweetup, of course. The funny ones, however, help in making twitter a non-stop laugh riot and a 24 hour party, if you’ve worked the time-zones well enough.

Indian comics on twitter have exploited every socio-political opportunity to poke fun at authorities and audiences alike. Take the Commonwealth Games for example, the opening ceremony saw non stop tweeting of snide commentary about Kalmadi’s speech, Manmohan Singh and Pratibha Patil’s lack of expressions and Sheila Dikshit’s senility at suggesting that there have been no power cuts in Delhi in the last two years. The Ayodhya Verdict, too, led to much inspired commentation – quoting Rohan Joshi (@MojoRojo), “There is only one way to make everybody forget about the Babri Masjid; Make repairing it the BMC's job. Another hot topic, of course, is Arnab Goswami. Rakesh Jhunjhunwaala, who claism to be God and to have invented twitter, and amasses a follower base of over 14 thousand twitter users, once tweeted “Arnab Goswami has never finished a sentence his whole life because everytime he starts to speak he ends up interrupting himself.” No subject is taboo, no issue too sacrosanct for these comics, and they will use all ammunition, from ND Tiwari to Rakhi Sawant, to tickle your funny bone (no puns intended, of course).

A close look at the viral retweets and the most favourited tweets gives you a clear idea about how comics are winning the popularity contest we lovingly refer to as Twitter. A popular name among the twitterati is Gursimran Khamba – known to his followers as @gkhamba. When Khamba started tweeting, he had a modest following of about 150 people, mostly only the people he knew personally. Today, over six thousand people are regularly updated on his irreverent musing on everything topical and a majority of them are retweeted by hundreds of people.  “I’ve always had a talent for making snide remarks about everything. In person, people tend to get offended pretty often by those, but apparently when you do the same to celebrities, it’s funny,” says Khamba.

Once on Twitter, Khamba started writing for popular spoof website Faking News. This, he says, is what initially increased his visibility. “Twitter makes it easy to be politically incorrect – sure you lose a few followers every time you touch a taboo topic like politics or religion, but you have to remember that with each unfollow you’re separating the wheat from the chaff,” he points out.

Writer and stand up comic Rohan Joshi (@mojorojo), with about five thousand followers, thinks twitter, “is like an online soapbox, you can say exactly what you want and you’kll end up attracting like minded people.” Wannabe space cowboy, TV professional and suspected Blackberry Boy from the popular Vodafone Ad, Dharmesh Gandhi points out how “sometimes people think I'm funny when I'm just talking about my day-to-day life experiences. Sadly, they are full of misery for me. But as they say, ‘Everything is funny till it happens to you’.”

Saad Akhtar, Site Architecture specialist at Naukri.com by day and maker of FlyYouFools  comic by night (with close to 7 thousand followers on twitter), agrees with his fellow comics, asserting that “the quality of comedy depends greatly on the medium and the lack of censorship on twitter makes it an ideal breeding ground for wit and sarcasm.” Rohan Roushan, ex-TV journalist and now Pagal Patrakar of the Faking News fame, thinks that the 140 character constraints have pushed people to become sharper, more articulate and, therefore, wittier. “Even though you have the follower count as a vanity box, twitter has the tendency of being more egalitarian – everyone has the same space to speak their mind,” he adds. In a certain socio-cultural context, of course. But to his 19 thousand odd followers, the pagal patrakars musing and writings provide much food for thought.

Is there, however, a flipside to winning the race to be most liked – the pressure to keep up with your follower’s expectations, perhaps? Twitter is, after all, a strangely personal medium where “relationships” can only be sustained with conversations and regular interactions – this is how you grow your follower base and how you sustain it. “If I don’t feel like making jokes one day, or decide to comment on things in a not so obviously funny manner, suddenly followers will tell me I’m having an off day or that I’ve lost the funny somewhere,” Khamba adds.

The social networking site might just have changed the face of comedy, for professionals and amateurs alike. Even though most of the content on your timeline’s funny alter ego might be too politically incorrect and too edgy to be reproduced in print or on television, twitter is probably making people more open to comic outrage.

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(An edited version of this article appeared in The Hindustan Times on November 13th, 2010)

Mahabharata Goes Manga

If you've ever read the Mahabharata, or watched it on the big or the small screen, you know that among the many reasons for the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas was the former's demand for five villages from the kingdom. This would seem like a measly request. However, the villages the five brothers asked for were the most strategic locations in the kingdom and effectively constituted Duryodhana's entire share.

Controversial as such alternative versions might be, they are part of the tradition of telling and retellings of the epic. It is this tradition that Shohei Emura, a Japanese graphic artist, and Vidyun Sabhaney, a Delhi-based comic book writer, aspire to create in their latest project to develop aManga Mahabharata.

The duo met at a comic book workshop organised by Sarai CSDS and instantly connected on a shared fascination with the epic, and its many traditions.

A philosophical treatise, a sacred religious text and a moving story. The Mahabharata is many things to many people. "In truth, the epic has grown through the oral tradition of story telling for centuries, the ancient clans' war for power and exploration of dharma was sung and danced to, reinterpreted and appropriated", says Sabhaney.

For centuries, the Mahabharata was more than the written compiled epic penned by Vyas, and it was even more than the Sunday episodes on Doordarshan. "Through the project we're trying to do three things: first, focus on and develop stories and characters considered peripheral and not included in popular tellings. Second, to explore the space for original writings within the epic and finally, we want to give space to the folk versions of the epic that, again, do not find their way into the popular versions," explains Sabhaney.

The artists have chosen to keep a dying tradition of experimental story telling within the Mahabharata alive through the Japanese art of Manga. According to Emura, "the Mahabharata is a fantastic story, unparalleled in its length and cultural importance. Manga has a history of telling stories that are lengthy, and complicated with several characters and the two match in that way." He adds, "I also feel there is still a lot that can be done to visually experiment with the Mahabharata."

Sabhaney believes that "the Manga form lends itself easily to any cultural contexts, as La Nouvelle Manga in France and the various uses of the form in American culture have illustrated. Its ability to simplify things, yet keep the nuances of sound and light are probably why it's easy to tell complicated stories through this medium."

The form will enable the artist to express the dynamics of the relationships between characters and self-reflective moments equally well. The physical features of characters are fairly within the Manga format with exaggerated expressions and "whimsical images", as the word's literal Japanese translation suggests.

Presented by the Peoples' Tree Arts Trust, the first episode in the project will be published by the Pao Collective in the coming months. Title Chilka, the episode is an off shoot from the story of Karna's death using the voice of the trouble-making Narad Rishi and using a ficticious character of Baba, a slightly forgetful old school warrior who has an obsessive desire to save Arjuna from what he believes is certain death.

"Chilka was a great learning experience but to make the next comic, we need to know where the Mahabharata comes from — about its oral tradition,  song and dance based traditions," says Emura. And for that, come December, the duo plan to travel to various parts of the country and explore traditions such as Yakshagana in Karnataka and the oral traditions of Rajasthan, among others.

They also plan to organise workshops next year for comic book artists to connect with each other and learn, and perhaps also learn a bit more about Manga.

(Originally published here in The Hindustan Times)

Ishq-e-Dilli

It's the time of the year when Delhi begins to welcome the winter, with the fresh smell of raat-ki-rani blossoms and a pleasant nip in the evening air. Add to that the overpowering sense of history that the air around Delhi's oldest fort is immersed in. The romance of a 5,000 year old historical tale is palpable. This is the setting of the re-launch of the Light and Sound show at the Purana Qila.

Housed between the Kilkari Bhairon Mandir and the National Zoological Park, the fort is known to be the sixth of the seven cities that make up modern day Delhi. From belief that it stands at the site of the ancient city of Indraparastha from the Hindu epic Mahabharata — a claim that hasn't yet been substantiated — to being home to many Mughal emperors like Humayun, who died here, falling down the stairs from his library, the Purana Qila is central to an understanding of Delhi and its history.

Ishq-e-Dilli, the soon-to-be-launched Light and Sound show invokes an intricate web of stories, from the time of the Pandavas to post-independence India, to bring to life the history of Delhi. The re-imagined Light and Sound show uses state of the art technology — with video projections, lasers, digital drawing and storytelling traditions — and creates images that reflect the man rise and falls the city has seen in its history. The projections are cast from a forty metre distance, mapping the architecture as it illuminates it with colourful illustrations.

Scripted, designed, narrated and produced by Two Is A Film Company for the ITDC, the show will open to the public in November. Earlier criticised for delayed schedule (it was supposed to open for the CommonWealth Games, after all) and for the heavy machinery that will become a permanent fixture at the historical site, the renewed Light and Sound show hasn't been free of hiccups, so to speak. But organisers are hoping that once it's open, they can dazzle the critics into silence.

We only wish history lessons had always been this magnificent.

(Originally Published here in The Hindustan Times)